The clerk's tale : young men and moral life in nineteenth-century America / Thomas Augst.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Augst, Thomas, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Self-culture--United States--History--19th century.

Self-culture.

Middle class--United States--History--19th century.

Middle class.

Young men--United States--History--19th century.

Young men.

Young men--United States--Social conditions--19th century.

Young men--United States--Social life and customs--19th century.

Literacy--Social aspects--United States--History--19th century.

Literacy.

United States--Social conditions--19th century.

United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (334 pages) : illustrations

Place of Publication:

Chicago, Illinois : University of Chicago Press, [2003]

Summary:

Thousands of men left their families for the bustling cities of nineteenth-century America, where many of them found work as clerks. The Clerk's Tale recounts their remarkable story, describing the struggle of aspiring businessmen to come of age at the dawn of the modern era. How did these young men understand the volatile world of American capitalism and make sense of their place within it? Thomas Augst follows clerks as they made their way through the boarding houses, parlors, and offices of the big city. Tracing the course of their everyday lives, Augst shows how these young men used acts of reading and writing to navigate the anonymous world of market culture and claim identities for themselves within it. Clerks, he reveals, calculated their prospects in diaries, composed detailed letters to friends and family, attended lectures by key thinkers of the day, joined libraries where they consumed fiction, all while wrestling with the boredom of their work. What results, then, is a poignant look at the literary practices of ordinary people and an affecting meditation on the moral lives of men in antebellum America.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Moral Economy of Literacy

Chapter One Accounting for Character: Diaries and the Moral Practice of Everyday Life

The Coin of Character

Memory and the Commonplace Tradition

Self-Examination and the Devotions of Literacy

Time Is Money: The Value of the Future

Equality of Aspiration

Chapter Two Forms of Feeling: Habit, Leisure, and the Domestication of Literary Taste

The Drill of Nature

Letters and the Debts of Family

The Profit of Pleasure

The Art of Conversation

Sentimental Pathos and the Conventions of Intimacy

Chapter Three Popular Philosophy and Democratic Voice: Emerson in the Lecture Hall

Becoming Whole: The Struggle for Composure

Modes of Civic Education

The Eloquence of Moral Life

Chapter Four Making Society out of Books: The New York Mercantile Library and the Enterprise of Reading

Circulating Libraries and the Business of Books

Reading and Breeding for the Profession

The Liberty of Intellect and the Taste for Fiction

Chapter Five The Melancholy of White-Collar Work: Professional Ethos and the Modern Literary Sphere

The Blank Page and the Place of Writing

The Credit of Character, in Parts and Whole

Professional Authorship and the Literary Sphere

Epilogue: Debris from the Business of Living

Epilogue

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [305]-307) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780226795737

022679573X

OCLC:

1243310467